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No Time for Comedy: Mint
Theater Company, March 25, 2002
New York Times,
March 27, 2002
Playwright With a Problem: The
World Is Falling Apart
By BRUCE WEBER
S. N. Behrman was in his mid-40's when he wrote
''No Time for Comedy,'' and the play, bittersweet
and obviously self-examining, shows every sign of a
playwright's midlife crisis, both as a writer and
man. Known for his sophisticated comedies, largely
about the upper class, Behrman was prolific and
popular. But when ''No Time for Comedy'' opened on
Broadway in 1939 (starring Laurence Olivier and
Katherine Cornell), Spain was convulsed in civil war
and all of Europe threatened by the harrowing shadow
of the Nazis, and the play is about a playwright who
is agonized by his success in the genre of
sophisticated comedies when the world is such a
serious place.
Further, the play is of the self-referential sort
whose plot (the writer has to choose between his
sensible, skeptical and highly competent wife and
his romantic, possibly foolish lover who believes in
a dare-to-be-great philosophy) purports to explain
how the play itself came to be written. Its
fundamental question, asked of the main character,
Gaylord Easterbrook, is: Which kind of man do you
wish to be?
And it ends at the moment before he is forced to
decide, which underscores the sense that the
playwright himself was tearing his own hair out over
the very question.
It is, in other words, a clever, intelligent and
almost impossibly earnest piece of work that more
than likely felt absolutely on point at a time in
American history when our obligation to the rest of
the world was increasingly at issue. Today, in spite
of the claims to its current relevance by the Mint
Theater Company, which has revived it, ''No Time for
Comedy'' reeks of period idiosyncrasy. The question
raised by the title has long since been settled,
most recently by the aftermath of Sept. 11, which
proved that comedy is not only not inappropriate in
a time of crisis, but that it is often welcome and
important.
But even by more mundane standards, the play feels
out of date. Behrman was writing about an upper
crust of the sort that either no longer exists in
New York (I wouldn't know) or doesn't hold the sort
of cultural prominence it once did.
This is a world where a playwright and his actress
wife live in hotel luxury, where he puts on a suit
to go to his writing studio each morning or to make
the rounds of bars when he suffers writerly agony,
and where she can lead a life of luxurious idleness
between star turns in her husband's plays. It's a
world where young women grow to adulthood seeking to
inspire men to greatness, where people seem to
associate wealth with a British hauteur and the
self-seriousness that is the stuff of romance novels
and soap operas. Paging David Niven!
The main problem with the Mint production is that
neither the director, Kent Paul, nor most of the
company has any feel for this vanished world. As a
result, all the performances but one seem to be in
imitation of movie actors, and the production itself
has none of the sprightliness or glib sparkle that
would leaven the playwright's sincere, heavy-handed
self-scrutiny.
The exception is Ted Pejovich who plays Philo Smith,
the banker whose younger wife is courting the
playwright, and who brings to the character's
undemonstrative resignation a very subtle and funny
physical wit.
Of the two principal women, Hope Chernov plays
Amanda Smith with the bland belief that her purpose
in life is to be a muse but with very little of the
flirtatiousness and sexuality that would make her
more than the well-dressed horn of a playwright's
dilemma. As Linda Easterbrook, a clever and
self-possessed woman who finds her comfortable life
threatened, Leslie Denniston gives a composed,
thoughtful and thoroughly unsurprising performance.
But the biggest difficulty here is Simon Brooking's
reading of the lead role. His Gay is indulgently
feckless, overbearing, expostulatory, selfish and
bloviating; he's written as a glib character with
natural charm but portrayed without glibness or
humor, not the kind of man who could entrance Amanda
or perpetually engage his wife. Worse, you don't
believe for a second that he might be capable of
writing the play he's performing in, which not only
disappoints the audience; it betrays the playwright
as well.
NO TIME FOR COMEDY
By S. N. Behrman; directed by Kent Paul; sets by
Tony Andrea; costumes by Jayde Chabot; lighting by
Peter West; sound by Jane Shaw; text coach, Robert
Neff Williams; prop specialist, Judi Guralnick;
production stage manager, Allison Deutsch; assistant
stage manager, Sara E. Friedman. Presented by the
Mint Theater Company, Jonathan Bank, artistic
director. At 311 West 43rd Street, Clinton.
WITH: Diane Ciesla (Mary), Leslie Denniston (Linda
Easterbrook), Ted Pejovich (Philo Smith), Simon
Brooking (Gaylord Easterbrook), Hope Chernov (Amanda
Smith), Jason Summers (Robert) and Shawn Sturnick
(Makepeace Lovell).
No Time for Comedy: Mint
Theater Company, March 25, 2002 |
